


There's somethin' about you

by Shaish



Series: Wings [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky - Freeform, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 23:52:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7075861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shaish/pseuds/Shaish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A chapter for Bucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's somethin' about you

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Kay (Stringlish) for betaing. <333  
> Music; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLTKbk2gB-I

He stops at the corner and peers just around it into the room, catches light on blonde making it gold and his breath catches quietly in his chest, stilled in the silence.

Steve’s head is tilted back, face taking in the sun from the floor to ceiling windows, wings relaxed and fanned out wide, catching and soaking in the rays of the sun trying to hit the floor around him.

He does this sometimes, Steve, exists in quiet moments of silence and soft breaths and gold sunlight. Sometimes it’s night and he’s in the path of the moon. Sometimes there’s no light at all and all Bucky can hear is his breathing, soft and steady in the night. Sometimes Steve is still like this, and they’re not all there, but Bucky has memories of when Steve could never be still, could never let time wash over him and drift by without trying to grab and strangle it in his grip with the force of his painful need and drive to _do_ something.

It makes him ache, watching Steve in these moments, watching him at all, really. The memories are still coming slow, like patches of sunlight slowly filtering through dreary clouds, sprouts finally escaping soil to find light. Even without all of them, watching Steve almost _hurts_ in ways he’s slowly starting to relearn, understand. His heart feels five sizes too big and like it’s full of pressurized air, ready to burst and fly away like a balloon on the wind. God, he thinks he’d let it. He thinks he would.

The elevator doors behind him open and he tenses, turning his head slightly to look. His double looks back.

They stare at one another, trying to come to a conclusion and decide how to act and react.

His double- James, presses a button and the doors slide closed, but the elevator itself doesn’t leave. James still doesn’t trust him. Bucky doesn’t blame him.

He looks back into the room, watching Steve.

It’s fine. He doesn’t trust himself, either. He doesn’t trust anyone. Though, he thinks that might be a lie. Parts of him trust Steve instinctively, parts buried deep that _feel_ more than _think_. That’s probably why the chair and electricity didn’t take them away. It doesn’t work on instincts, only the mind, and Steve has taken up root and home in more than his mind.

He’s beautiful. 

He’s different from Sharon, though they both shine like gold. She’s more like...caramel, where Steve is like steel. They have both broken men, but they themselves have yet to be broken. Or perhaps they have been, just put back together and sealed with gold, like pottery. He read an article on it, thought of them, himself. He’s not put back together with gold, though, not exactly. 

Sharon and Steve and James and the others are in there, in his mind, his memories, but it’s not all good. There’s bad, too, and then there’s the confusion. He thinks he’s more like granite, scattered pieces gathered again and clumped together, trying to mold itself back into the shape of a human being, a person, the different, speckled parts bright and sharp and jagged. He’s still not sure if he is a person.

He watches Steve for half an hour and then retreats. 

The elevator doors slide open and James and him exchange places, stopping to regard one another.

James rounds the corner after a moment and the elevator doors slide closed, and Bucky closes his eyes.

All he sees is _Steve_ and _gold_.

\--

He does a lap around the gym, beats his wings and listens to his feathers rustle. The door opens and catches in his periphery, and he looks over.

He curves around another lap, then lowers to land, folding his wings to his back while the air current simulations stop.

She is bright red in the room, like a...beacon?

Familiar.

“Widow,” he greets. Her lips curve. Some deep part of him knows her, really knows her, but it’s only a feeling.

“Barnes,” she returns, taking a seat on the bench. He’s thirsty, but his instincts are telling him to wait her out. For what? He doesn’t know. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she comments.

“I’ve been avoiding everyone,” he returns, watches her eyebrows rise. Now he can reach for his water bottle.

“You sound more like James now.”

He frowns, swallowing his mouthful.

“Honest,” she clarifies with a smile. His wings shift. She smiles further. “More expressive,” she notes.

He doesn’t comment on that. He doesn’t remember enough to-

“Why are you here?” he asks.

She quirks a brow and shifts her wings, slow and measured. 

“Steve misses you.”

“You’re here to intervene?” 

“I don’t like seeing him sad.”

He pauses. 

She looks at him. “Neither do you.”

He looks away. “I’m not ready.”

“You’ll never be ready. And Steve would give you forever if it meant you could be.”

He frowns at the gym’s wall of windows, wings giving a slight twitch. He drops his eyes to his water bottle, turning it in his hand and listening to it crumple under his fingers.

“I just need a little more time,” he eventually says, low and quiet.

She stands and heads for the door, leaving all his possible excuses to fill the silence.

 _Steve was always braver than me_ , he thinks, and a memory rises to prove it.

\--

There are more memories, eventually. They trickle in like stained glass falling in reverse, slowly slotting back into place. They light up warm with each new one. The good ones, anyway. There are some that are cold, ice shards in his veins that freeze him to the spot and make his body tremble, his wings shake. Sometimes he lets Sharon close, when she’s there, curls up and lets her hold him and stroke his wings, his hair. Sometimes he needs to be alone and sort out the fragments and sounds, fits them together to slow, warm up exercises and training that his mind is slowly remembering and his body never seems to forget, regardless of each thorough wipe.

And sometimes he just watches Steve.

He watches Steve regardless, because it helps, brings warmer, fonder memories and shifts his focus from ice to warmth, pain to longing. And he does long, but he can’t bring himself to get too close, to either Steve or his double- to James. It’s too soon.

So he watches, and relishes in the distant sunrays of Steven Grant Rogers and waits until he is complete enough that he can touch Steve without shattering.

\--

They don’t tell him he is in love with Steve, not with words, but Bucky eventually figures it out when he has enough memory pieces to put it together; hugs that are too tight, mouths pressed together, feathers buried in his own, bodies moving in tandem on the battlefield and eventually, off of it. 

And it’s strange to realize: he fell in love with Steve again before what was buried of it came back. 

He’s loved Steve again from the moment their wings brushed standing on the rubble of the Hydra bank vault, staring out a gathering crowd of people who will never understand them. Maybe it might’ve been a little before that, shortly just after Pierce’s body fell. It’s appropriate, he thinks, that he would find love while a man is bleeding out on the floor at his feet. But he’s a monster, something that belongs in the dark, so of course he would.

The part that hurts, though, and Bucky feels this has always been true, is that Steve loves him _back_. Steve is not innocent, but he is _good_. Bucky is not innocent, and he is _not_ good. He will taint Steve, someday, if he hasn’t already, and the thought feels familiar, an echo in a dream that grows stronger the more it resounds, rather than weaker. 

He will be Steve’s undoing, but maybe Steve can be his, too. Maybe that wouldn’t be as bad as his older selves have feared, though the fear itself still lingers, echoes through the decades in the shell of his body.

\--

He watches Steve laugh at something James says, too low for him to hear, watches his wings shuffle and James’ pleased smile. James never laughs. That feels true.

James gets up, and as soon as he’s behind Steve, his eyes find him, just a glance as he goes with eyes lighter than his, hair longer than his. His own is growing, hangs down to brush the tips of his ears, but James’ is miles longer, decorated with a few Asgardian braids. Bucky almost wants to grow his own out just to know what that would feel like, to feel a trusted someone’s fingers braiding through his hair, lock of hair over lock of hair.

He swallows, steels himself, and makes himself take a step forward, then another.

Steve spots and turns towards him on his seat halfway there. “Bucky?” he asks, eyebrows raised and wings perking up.

Bucky watches him try to control himself, watches Steve steel himself, lower his wings and reign in his hope. 

He doesn’t...want that.

He takes a seat next to Steve, feels and sees Steve tense in his periphery, wings and body full of nervous energy.

It’s quiet for a minute.

“How are you...feeling?” Steve ventures uncertainly.

“Okay,” he answers. 

Steve nods. “Okay.”

“You’re nervous,” he observes.

“I-” Steve pauses. He huffs a breath and ducks his head, wings shuffling a little. “I feel kinda like I’m sittin’ next to Linda Walker in ninth grade again,” he says with a small little smile aimed Bucky’s way, “Too good for me and beautiful enough to give Leila Hyams a run for her money.”

Bucky doesn’t flush, but his toes curl on the bar stool and his wings shift a little before settling, lips curling up a smidge.

Steve smiles, ducking his head again. Bucky can almost see him, a hundred and forty pounds lighter with a crooked spine and longer bangs falling in his eyes, scuffing the ground with his shoe. His wings were so much smaller, then.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” he tries teasing gently. Steve’s smile stretches and his cheeks blush, wings shuffling.

They sit quietly for a bit. Bucky just watches Steve, lips curling without his say whenever Steve glances over and sees him looking and blushes just a little more. It’s spread down beneath the collar of his t-shirt.

Bucky remembers that, now, how Steve looks flushed all over, and how he sounds when Bucky manages to make him feel good.

He stretches a wing across the space between them after a moment, brushing Steve’s. The smile Steve gives him puts the warmth of the sun to shame.

Steve’s wing brushes his back.

“I missed ya, Buck,” Steve says, soft and quiet.

Bucky reaches over and hooks their pinkies together as James comes back in and takes his seat on the other side of Steve, where he belongs, finally where they both belong.

“I missed you, too, punk.”

Steve smiles. Bucky watches it stretch slow into something big and bright, and finally lets himself come in from the cold to bathe in Steve’s light. That feels familiar, too.

( _And then the memories are there_ ).

 

_Bonus_

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says softly. 

He cracks his eyes open and looks up. 

Steve stares back down, smile soft as sunlight. He wants to touch it.

He reaches a hand up-

Stops.

Steve stays still and waits, patient, and Bucky slowly stretches his fingers up, touching the edge of his smile. Steve’s wings flutter gently and it’s...ridiculous, like a child, but it makes him want to smile, too, so he does, and it doesn’t feel so strange on his face now.

“How was your nap?” Steve asks softly after a while. Bucky retracts his hand, turning his head to look out the window.

“Nice,” he replies, because he can say that now. He can say anything. “Peaceful,” he eventually settles on, Steve waiting the whole while. He looks back up.

Steve’s smile stretches a little wider and he nods, standing back up. “Do you want to come have lunch with me and James?” he asks. They’ve all been trying to do that since he came back, word things as questions. It helps sometimes. Other times, it’s frustrating.

He’s still angry a lot.

He reaches a hand up and Steve blinks, smiling again before taking it and helping him up.

“Where are we going?” he asks, because he can ask questions, now, too.

“Cafe on the fiftieth floor,” Steve answers, leading the way to the elevator. Steve trusts him with his back, the back of his neck, the space between and under of his wings, all of the vulnerable little places the Soldier in him could tear him to shreds.

Bucky follows him easily into the elevator.

The doors slide closed and the ride down is quiet, but Bucky reaches over to take Steve’s hand, and Steve grips his back, and they share a smile.


End file.
